1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing system such as a work station and a personal computer for creating, storing, reproducing and retrieving a wide variety of media-type data such as texts, graphics, images, video and voices.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an information processing system such as a work station and a personal computer, a wide variety of media-type data created or input are stored in a disk in the form of a file. The user retrieves and uses the data from the disk whenever required. Means for allowing the user to acquire data include, for example, allocating a file name in textual form or icons in graphics to the data and displaying a list thereof whereby the user is allowed to designate intended data, or retrieving an intended data from the disk containing a great amount of data using an associated keyword or the like.
In the "information processing system" cited in the Cross-Reference, a bit-map image of data is compressed and a list of the browsing data (BD) is displayed, thereby permitting retrieving operation. A plurality of bit-map images can be entered with respect to a single datum and can be sequentially displayed in the same area. The browsing data can be created without changing the application program (AP) with which the data is created. The browsing data is a compression of a bit-map image of the data, and therefore an application program need not be invoked anew for confirming the contents.
According to JP-A-3-292572, portions of the video data associated with occurrence of a scene change are detected, and a preceding or succeeding frame of each scene change point is entered into a browsing list as a browsing image. All of these frames are listed and displayed at the time of retrieval. The "scene" is defined as a collection of frames in which video data images are picked up continuously. The portion of occurrence of a scene change is assumed to designate a portion connecting two different scenes. Also, the "frame" is defined as a still image of a minimum unit of elements constituting the video data. According to this method, when the length of a scene is shorter than a predetermined time length, selection is possible except for the particular scene. This method permits a frame of the browsing image to be selected and used as browsing data for each scene.
The data for browsing created or input by an application program in an information processing system will hereinafter be referred to as media data or application-specific data (ASD), and the compressed (scaled-down) bit-map image used for retrieving the media data will be referred to as retrieval or browsing data. The browsing data is assumed to include at least one scaled-down bit-map image. Also, the operation of displaying on the screen the browsing data scaled down from a bit-map image of the data as a list or displaying a plurality of browsing data sequentially in the same area on the screen will be referred to as browsing.
The above-mentioned means for displaying a list of the contents of data in textual form can at most display the file name, the name of the entity that has created the file, date and time, etc. It is difficult to supply a sufficient amount of information for the user to grasp the contents of the media data. As a result, it becomes necessary for the user to store the correspondence between the file name, etc. and the contents of the media data. As an alternative, the application program that has created the particular media data must be newly invoked in order to confirm the contents.
The means for displaying a list of icons described above poses a similar problem to the means for displaying a list of texts. For icons, however, the use of a dedicated editor or the like permits creation of independent icons for each data, although special effort is required each time data is created.
The method using a keyword or the like, on the other hand, is such that the entered keyword does not necessarily match the keyword used for retrieval. Also, new invocation of an application program is required if the contents are to be confirmed.
The information processing system described in the Cross-Reference can solve the problem points described above. Since such an information processing system cannot handle audio data having no visible information like the bit-map image, however, a different interface must be realized and used when handling nonvisible data.
For media data to be retrieved from the browsing data, it is necessary to associate the file names of the two data with each other. In the method described in the Cross-Reference, the user is required to input the file name of the media data for the purpose of association. Also, when application data are newly created, modified or deleted, the user is required to enter, re-enter or delete the browsing data. Further, even a user who is not permitted to access the media data file is capable of referencing the contents of the browsing data file.
According to JP-A-3-292572, when the video data has a number of scenes, the number of bit-map images correspondingly increases, thus requiring a long time for retrieval. In other words, it is not sufficient only to use the frames with scene changes as a bit-map image for retrieval.